Gevlon is proud to be a cog in a winning machine, setting personal heroics aside for a greater win. Of course not a collective win... or maybe... but that's what socials do! Why, he said it himself: "Even worse if he calls a friend to fight back you enforce social beliefs: 'While I was defeated, we won'!"

Social working together to beat a better individual player: Bad.Goblins working together to beat a better individual player: Good.

Perfectly consistent.

[edit] Due to a flame war, a large number of comments have been deleted and posting in here suspended for the time being. I apologize for the inconvenience.

19
comments:

Anonymous
said...

It is, in fact, completely not a contradiction, as you really ought to be able to tell.

Gevlon has never been opposed to working together with people, as long as it is mutually beneficial. If, however, you are helping someone without getting anything out of it, then you are acting like a Social, and that is bad.

So here, Gevlon is saying "If we work together, we can succeed together rather than fail individually!" which is of course what the whole point of raiding and BGs are supposed to be.

I think its good that Gevlon is starting to see that he has been a social all this time. Instead of this ridicule and pointing fingers, we should applaud him for helping others!Good on you Gevlon, now go make some more free crafts for guildies, you big communist you.

Recently I've gotten a bit tired with gevlon and his self-congratulating posts about his projects. Take the ganking guild - there is no way he can actually be sure of its success. And he knows it, or he wouldn't have switched his mission statement to "fighting bots".

Plus he neglects the simple fact that a game, a multiplayer game, is, by it's very nature, social. It is about players having fun together. You can't "win" WoW. "Winning" means having fun. So, by the same reasoning, if I want to win, I should be ready to help others have fun - as long as it doesn't come at the expense of my own fun.

And fun is a) very subjective b) a highly social and emotional function - both of which gevlon simply doesn't seem to understand.

While I think that Gevlon sometimes has messed up ideas I don't think there is a contradiction in this case. In a BG he isn't teaming up to defeat a more skilled enemy. He is teaming up to defeat a less skilled enemy. In fact the ability to work together in this case is what makes his team more skilled.

For Gevlon, being Social (as opposed to being social) does not mean you interact with other people, it means you interact with other people for entirely the wrong reasons; i.e. for no benefit for yourself.

Conversely, stuff like the BGs, the Undergeared project and the ganking project all in fact have a point. In fact it's related to why he has a blog in the first place: he wants to convince people to be less Social and more Goblin because he postulates that a world filled with Goblins would be better than the world as it is now, and that would be of benefit to Gevlon because, as he's pointed out, he shares the world with us.

"For Gevlon, being Social (as opposed to being social) does not mean you interact with other people, it means you interact with other people for entirely the wrong reasons; i.e. for no benefit for yourself."

So what you mean is social in Gevlon's terms is whatever his whimsy and every changing definition of it means.

@tyra : "So what you mean is social in Gevlon's terms is whatever his whimsy and every changing definition of it means."

How can he mean what every changing definition of it means? If there are multiple different definitions and he means them all at once, he would be stating a contradiction as fact. Are you referring to the fact that English, either as a whole or as he uses it, features operator overload as an intrinsic feature, and blaming Gevlon for this state of affairs? Or are you just objecting to the fact that either his definition is unclear or seeming to change over time, in a particularly incoherent fashion?

@Primetimecasual: "Plus he neglects the simple fact that a game, a multiplayer game, is, by it's very nature, social. It is about players having fun together."

This is wholly incorrect. I cannot think of anything less fun to play than a game that is "about" having fun, whatever that means. Someone's purpose in playing a game could possibly be fun, or possibly not, but the game itself will be about something specific, or in the case of WoW, many different specific things. Since you don't understand what games are about, it's not surprising that you mistake his posts as self-congratulation, and it's not surprising that you find that annoying, as self-congratulation for the accomplishment of having fun is not very notable.

@stabs: "Gevlon is one of the most social players I've ever heard of.

Everything he does is about impressing other people, competing with other people, being cooler than other people or teaming with other people for an unusual goal.

He doesn't think he's social because he doesn't quite know what the word means in English."

Neither do you. It's true that the above goals are social in its most technical sense, but someone who were not social in that technical sense would be basically clinically insane. If he's the most social WoW player you know, I pity you, seriously.

Hm, if you actually read Gev's entire post, you come across quotes like "If you want to prove both that death penalty is defeatable and also that cooperation does not need "being nice freindly peep", join."

Or, you could quote the entire paragraph from his post, to give appropriate context: "I completely disagree with that for two reasons: at first to defeat socials we must understand that death is "bad luck lol" for him, while kill is the unquestionable proof of skill on his part. If you kill him 5 times and he manage to kill you once, he won't feel defeated at all. He will think that you were lucky with crits some times and was "unhonorable" by jumping on him, but finally his l33t skillz prevailed. Even worse if he calls a friend to fight back you enforce social beliefs: "While I was defeated, we won"!"

Now that we aren't working completely out of context:

"Social working together to beat a better individual player: Bad."

This is wrong. He's not saying it's morally bad, he's saying it is practically bad, when your goal is to demoralize the horde.

"Goblins working together to beat a better individual player: Good."

Well, if the goal is as above, then yes, that is a good way to accomplish it. This is not what his post was saying however, he's talking about winning in battlegrounds with even numbers, so it's not multiple goblins beating one lone skilled player, is it?

One day I will figure out if you are intellectually dishonest or just slow; that's my purpose in posting here if you hadn't discerned that yet.

Then, tell me, what ARE games about, if not about having fun? Games have specific goals, that is true, but these goals are merely there to direct you in a way, to give you a purpose. Don't mistake in-game goals for the out-of-game reason that games exist.

Or rather, what is the act of playing a game about, if not having fun?

A single player game, you can define your in-game goals as you wish, behave as you wish. As soon as you play multi-player, you have to take other players into account. If you are a complete jerk when playing boardgames, you will quickly find yourself not being able to play the game of your choice, because no-one will wish to play with you. That doesn't mean you can't be competitive, it just means that as soon as you accept to be part of a group experience (playing a multi-player game), you would do well to think about a behaviour that lets other players, even if they lose badly, have fun as well.

@Micah: That's true, but it's why I added the individual part to it: the individual players might be worse but teamwork gets them through that. The losers have higher DPS and killing blows and all that, but the other team has teamwork.

@Kurt: I linked his post. People can find the context if they think there's a problem.

I would never suggest that Gevlon thinks something is morally bad. He knows that morals are arbitrary social rules based on their claims of some unseen dieties. But feel free to misread my posts in the future. It seems to entertain you, so I consider that mission accomplished.

"I would never suggest that Gevlon thinks something is morally bad. He knows that morals are arbitrary social rules based on their claims of some unseen dieties. But feel free to misread my posts in the future. It seems to entertain you, so I consider that mission accomplished."

You are equally as wrong whether or not you were operating under the assumption that his terminology was moral in nature. (Well, arguably you are more wrong this way, since that was a more understandable error to make.) That point was a side note to assist you just in case that was the route your misapprehension had taken, since you are having so much difficulty understanding the discourse. Reread my post with that in mind, and you may figure out what's at issue here.

Actually, I'll write it in a simpler style, since you objected so fervently to my satirical complexity earlier:

Playing games can be about having fun. The game itself is about several types of things--put simply, WoW for example is about killing monsters, forming teams, collecting achievements/items, exploring a world, participating in a story, etc. But it's not about "having fun". It's just like if you were to say 'Hamlet' is about entertainment, or education, because that's why you read it. The purposes to which you put 'Hamlet' do not magically become what 'Hamlet' is about, that's not how it works.

The reason why I take such pains to distinguish the purpose of playing a game, from the subject matter of the game itself, is that when we carefully examine the relationship between the subject matter and the purposes to which each is put, we often find that the things which we claim as not fun about the game are the things that end up providing most of the motivation to play. People play to prove things, to compete, to provide a challenge, to provide a lack of challenge, etc. Yes, fun is a sufficiently amorphous term that you could say that people grind the Insane title because that is what is fun for them to do, as proven by the fact that they choose to grind that title rather than farm something else like better gear, etc. However, that argument is applicable to the majority of things that happen in real life as well, so at that point you have lost the relationship between fun and playing games that you were attempting to prove in the first place. (Working 40 years so that your grandchildren can go to Harvard is fun for you, because otherwise you wouldn't do it, you'd do something else--it's just too general of an argument at that point right, at that point you're just equating fun with free will.)

Hamlet was written to entertain the audience sufficiently for Shakespeare to be able to eat and as with much art, to provide commentary on the world.

Games exist to provide sufficient fun to make a profit for the makers. That fun can come from many sources: challenge, social interaction, etc; but ultimately it is about triggering a 'fun reaction' in the player. Fun is not necessarily easy or mindless.

Working 40 years so my children can go to Harvard is not in the context of a game, and so fun is most likely irrelevant. Instead there is an ape sub-routine triggered by advancing our offspring. A person might have fun while working (many do), but fun is secondary in the context of work. In the opposite manner, fun is primary to games.

You appear to have completely misread what I was suggesting with the contradiction. Gvelon's post suggested there was a flaw in the behavior of the socials when teaming up against his gankers, while his guild exhibits nearly identical behavior of teaming up to accomplish a goal impossible for the individual. Certainly he was also saying the obvious "it's bad when the enemy wins", but that's a very limited reading of his post.

Lol, you want me to start a blog focused on how your blog is bad, when your blog's main focus is how Gevlon's blog is bad. Sorry, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I don't think much of you, so I'm going to have to decline on principle.

If you think the main focus of my blog is how Gevlon's blog is bad, then you're a fucking idiot.

Sure, I have fun pointing out his flaws. He's pointed out mine. That's part of advancing: finding flaws in the current so the next can be better. If I spent all my time criticizing him, where would I find the time to post about silly ways to run heroics, 25 man raids, economics?